


The Sticky Remainders

by orphan_account



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: F/F, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, majorly judging you
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-26
Updated: 2017-03-30
Packaged: 2018-10-11 05:12:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10455867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: My first stab at Majorly Judging You.  As requested by a tumblr user who wanted me to explore their respective experiences with PTSD.  Here is an Alura-focused section, with a Lucy-focused section at some point to follow.





	1. Chapter 1

“What do you call this?” Alura asked around a sticky-sweet mouthful of something blue.  By the time she finished her sentence, it had melted away, dissolving into ephemeral sweetness.  

“Cotton candy,” Lucy answered, her amusement evident.  Their fingers tangled together, they strolled down the boardwalk into the sunset, wandering past the mini-golfers and underneath the shadow of National City’s largest ferris wheel.  It was a mild, breezy evening, and they were dressed comfortably, in matching loose khaki pants and light-colored tank tops.  Lucy had made a joke that they had inadvertently made themselves look extra gay, and Alura didn’t really understand, but Lucy had seemed amused, so she laughed anyway.  

Lucy handed her the stick again, and Alura gingerly tried to tear off another hank of it with her teeth.  

Alura thought for a moment, feeling it melt away on her tongue.  She smiled.  It wasn’t the sweetness that was pleasant, so much as the strangely magical consistency of it, even the mildly annoying way that bits of it stuck to her lips.  “I wouldn’t know how to describe this to someone.”

Lucy pinched off a bit with her strong, slim fingers and popped it in her mouth, grinning.  Alura loved that grin, the way Lucy took such delight in showing Alura all the little pleasures of her world, re-experiencing them as she did.  

Alura gaped at her in shock.  “It’s considered acceptable to do that?”

“What?”

“Tear it off with your fingers!”

Lucy laughed.  “Of course.”  She leaned in and kissed Alura then, and Alura felt Lucy’s tongue chasing little traces of the confection off of her lips.

“Hm,” Alura sighed as she pulled away.  “I think you only did that for the cotton candy on my mouth.”

Lucy scrunched up her nose.  “Well.  Not  _ only _ .”  She passed the stick back to Alura, and they quickly finished the sticky remainder of the cotton candy.  Lucy’s eyes lit up, then.  “Let’s go on the Ferris Wheel,” she said, tugging on Alura’s wrist.  She pointed at the large structure, it’s long spokes studded with lights that sat bright against the russet sky as dusk was moving in.  

Alura agreed, and they stood in line, discussing the finer points of American immigration law while they waited.

“Wait until you see the view from the top,” Lucy enthused as they drew close to the head of the line.  “Plus those enclosed cars are…”  She paused, looking a bit naughty.  “...very nicely private.”  Her eyes sparkled when she said this.  Alura got the idea.  This was meant to be romantic.  Possibly that other thing, as well.  What was the word Lucy liked?  Ah, yes.  Sexy.

They mounted the metal steps, and the little car descended into place.  The grizzled operator opened the screened door of the odd-shaped, rounded car, and Alura was suddenly struck by how very small and dark the inside of it seemed.  She hesitated.  “I… I don’t know, Lucy…”

Lucy took her arm with a gentle, reassuring grasp.  “It’s alright, I know it looks a little sketchy, but these things are perfectly safe, I promise.”

No.  That car, it was too small.  She didn’t like it.  Something in her rebelled.  Panic rose in her chest and pressed cold fingers around her throat.  She looked warily at Lucy.  “I don’t want to.”  

Lucy gently moved past her and stepped inside.  She sat down and held a hand out to Alura.  “See?  It’s fine.”

“It is too small,” Alura objected quietly.

“Come on, lady,” the operator groused, “you’re holding up the line.”

“I’ll be with you,” Lucy pleaded gently.  “It’ll be alright, I promise.”

Alura ducked down, and followed Lucy into the car.  The operator closed the door, and she started at the first motion of the car as it lurched upward a few feet.  Her hands shook, and Lucy held onto her arm.  

“It’s alright,” Lucy promised her.

“It is too small,” Alura said again, her voice shaking.  Her heart battered in her stomach.  Too small.  Too close.  She started remembering the way the skies of Krypton looked, streaked with fire, and the dust rising from the crumbling buildings as she tore away from the surface the night she left in that pod.   _ And the sound, that awful sound, a groan and a roar all at once, the very world tearing itself apart. _  The memory of it still scraped at her senses.  It was suddenly fresh again.

Lucy drew her close.  “It’s alright.  This is not the pod, Alura.  Everything is fine.  I’m with you.  Okay?”  She understood.  Without needing to be told.  She understood.   _ How did I find someone who would understand so easily and so well? _

Alura nodded vigorously, but she kept her eyes closed, trying to push those memories out.   _ So much fire.  It was as if the sky had turned white.  The prickling sound of dust and detritus flinging itself against the pod’s shell. _  She focused on Lucy’s warmth, the press of her arms, the softness of her chest, the smells of all her various soaps for her skin and hair, the things she put on and in them to make herself look the way she wished.  Green smells, alive smells, clean smells.

The car lurched upwards another few feet as more passengers got on.  

“Listen,”  Lucy said softly.  “We’re here, on Earth.  Not Krypton.  This isn’t a pod.  It’s just a car on a ride at an amusement park.  There’s no fire in the sky.  Just a yellow sun, setting.  Clouds.  Birds.  Seagulls.  You like birds, because you never had them on Krypton.”  Lucy was reminding her.  

She shook in Lucy’s strong arms, willing herself not to cry.  She had not, she supposed, had a reason to be in a small, enclosed space like this in some time.  She had failed to anticipate the possibility of this reaction.

She felt Lucy’s fingers stroke her hair, her bare shoulder.  “If you open your eyes,” she went on softly, “you’ll see the sunset on the water.  You’ll see the streaks of clouds.  You’ll see the orange groves in the distance.  You’d like it.”   She heard Lucy take a deep breath, exaggerated, and then urge her, “Now you take one.  Deep breath, it’ll help, I promise.”

Alura breathed deeply.  Released it.  Breathed again.  Let herself feel the environment around her; Lucy’s warm body next to her, the breezes off of the ocean, the sea birds, the clang and ding and clatter of the amusements below them.  Lucy breathed deeply again next to her, wordlessly urging her to do the same.  They continued, breathing together, as the car lurched upwards again.   _ You are here, _ she thought to herself.   _ Be here. _

“Wanna take a look?” Lucy murmured after a few minutes in which the car would lurch up a few feet, then stop, swinging softly above the ground.  “We’re pretty close to the top.”

Alura opened her eyes.  She looked at Lucy, who was gazing at her with concern.  She could feel that she still had no color in her cheeks.  But after a tender kiss from Lucy, she peered cautiously past her to what lay outside the screened-in ferris wheel car:  the vast, blue ocean, the ruddy pomegranate sun sinking low in the sky, the white sand, the first hints of stars breathing to life in the highest vaults of the heavens where dusty purple was just brushing in.  The white shapes of birds in their graceful scything across the air.  The map of lights below them on the boardwalk and the city beyond.  Earth.  Not Krypton.  Whole.  Not dying.

She covered her mouth with her hand and wept as something she couldn’t even name was released inside her.  She was alive.  Almost everyone else was gone, but she was alive.  And Rao had even seen fit to give her this woman, this strong, capable, intelligent woman, to enjoy what remained of her life with her, to show her this new world.  

She kissed Lucy again, this time with the fire of stubborn life in her chest.  

“I wanted to kiss you up here,” Lucy remarked, breathless.  “I didn’t imagine it quite like that.”

Alura smiled faintly.  “No complaining, Major,” she teased gently.

“Wouldn’t dream of it, Your Honor.”

The Ferris wheel began to spin.  They arced through the air, suspended in a shiny bauble on the spangled arm of a fanciful notion made by humans; up and down.  Sweet and ephemeral as cotton candy.   Alive.  Whole.  In love.  


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lucy struggles with flashbacks on the Fourth of July.

Lucy squinted and stared through the plaster dust and smoke that savaged her eyes and caked at the back of her throat.  She was ducked behind an overturned jeep, peering out into the chaos.   _ I’m a fucking lawyer, _ she thought,  _ what am I doing here? _  But she was an army lawyer.  She was trained for these circumstances.  So she relied upon her training and she fought.  

This part of Kandahar was supposed to have been cleared.  The only locals left in it were supposed to be friendlies.  But those kids (and goddamnit, but they were kids, not one among them could have been older than nineteen), spilling out of that open-bed pickup truck, were decidedly not friendly.  They had launched a couple of IEDs into a building.

She glanced down at the soldier next to her, one of the guards who’d greeted her when she’d arrived.  A compliance check, she thought bitterly, this was only supposed to be a compliance check.  She dragged his body out from where it was half-wedged under the jeep.  His face was blackened with dirt and soot, and his eyes were open, vacant.  He was gone, alright.  She saw him bleeding out on the dirt of the road.  She cursed.  She couldn’t get to his long gun, which was still inside the jeep, so she relieved him of his sidearm.  He wouldn’t be needing it.  She felt sticky remainders of his blood on the grip and trigger.

She squinted through the smoke at the truck careening through the street.  The kids in the truck had run out of shells for whatever that makeshift cannon was, and she saw now that two of them were jumping off the truck bed, and that their bodies were wired with charges.  She saw them headed toward the building at the end of the street, which was partially used as barracks and the rest of the units in it were occupied by locals.  

She was good with a nine millimeter.  Best in class by the end of basic.  She took two stray rounds in the shoulder for her trouble, but she took out the two runners before they could blow themselves up.  The others in the truck were nailed by a couple of guys in a jeep that came tearing in from the opposite end of the block.  

She was decorated.

She often woke up sweating.  She often saw the dead lieutenant on the dirty street next to her.  She often saw the two kids in their suicide vests.  They were younger, the closer she got to them.  Maybe more like fourteen.  

She woke up sobbing sometimes because she didn’t join the army to kill fourteen year olds.

She woke up angry sometimes because she didn’t understand why we as a species were so goddamned stupid, why she had to carry around the scars of that stupidity, why anyone did.

The nightmares hadn’t been so much of a problem since Alura, though.  James had been a reassuring presence, but he didn’t get that part of her, not the way Alura did.  

The fourth of July was always a bit of a problem for her these days.  The fireworks, she could sort of deal with, but in the middle of a nightmare that amounted to a particularly vivid replaying of that day in Kandahar, some of the neighborhood kids decided to set off a bunch of M80s in the street outside at 2 a.m.  Lucy awoke still gripped by her nightmares, still smelling gunpowder and engine oil and plaster dust, eyes still stinging from it all, tearing from the heat.  She found herself with jaw clenched, on top of Alura, with the muzzle of her Glock jammed up underneath her chin.  

She couldn’t see straight, not through her tears, not through the ghosts that plagued her vision, not through the violent slashes of light from the outside where the stupid kids were still blowing shit up because they just didn’t know better.  

But she heard Alura’s voice, very calm, reaching her through the chaos:  “At ease, Major Lane.  You cannot hurt me with that.”

_ Major Lane.  Right, that’s my name. _

“You will likely only hurt yourself.”

_ What if I want to hurt myself? _

After a long pause: “Are you with me, Lucy?”

_ Lucy.  That’s me.   _ She nodded once, shaking.

Another M80 exploded in the street.  Lucy twitched violently.  

“Do you know where you are?”

Lucy frowned.  She tried to focus.  She shook the ghosts away and for a moment, in the dark, she saw her face.  Alura’s face, gazing at her with steady, soft concern.

“You are not in Afghanistan.  You are at home, with someone who loves you.  You left that place behind.  Do you remember?”

Lucy trembled.  She remembered, but she was still mired in the residue of those memories.  She knew she didn’t want to hurt Alura.  

“Don’t be afraid,” Alura’s voice went on.  “I know these wounds in you.  Are you hurting from them tonight?”

Lucy nodded again.  Her jaw was clenched so hard it felt wired shut.  She couldn’t speak.  

She twitched again as Alura’s warm hand settled on her back.  “I am placing my hand on your back.  You should put your sidearm down, and then you may do whatever you wish with me.  I only want you to put down the weapon so as to avoid you injuring yourself.”

After a moment of staring at her through her cloud of memory and misery, Lucy engaged the safety, tossed the gun aside and lay trembling on top of Alura, feeling the weight of that hand on her back.  Then she sank into Alura’s body, roughly kissing her mouth, biting her neck, her hands tugging at the silky underthings that her lover slept in.  

“Can you speak to me, my love?” Alura asked, her voice low.

Lucy paused, looked at her desperately.  She had momentarily forgotten how.  

Alura gave her a pained look.  “I see.”  She paused, looking at Lucy for a moment while she thought.  “Well, I suppose I don’t need you to speak.  You may have me any way you wish, but you must be here, with me.  Not there.  Can you do that for me?”

Lucy’s lip trembled.  After a moment, she nodded.

She clung to Alura’s body, kissed her, bit her, made love to her far more roughly than she would have done with any human lover, and Alura only soothed her, occasionally firmly stopping her to insist upon eye contact, to make sure she was there, with her, finding release  _ with her _ , and not trapped in her pain and sorrow in that far-off time.  

Alura was strong, but her body was soft.  Lucy had nothing to fear in her arms.  They drowned out the damn fool kids in the street and  their stupid firecrackers with their rough, demanding lovemaking, grunting and moaning.  She would claw her way back to sweetness, to humanity, to wholeness.  She would take the sticky blackness of that misery, those memories, and incinerate them with her.  Alura’s body became, in those moments, a vessel for everything she was purging.  Lucy wasn’t even sure if she came or not, she just felt herself break, felt herself fall apart on top of Alura and let herself collapse in her embrace and be held, sobbing, until she could at least say one thing in a small, choked voice:  “Alura.”

Alura’s arms encircled her, squeezed her tighter than she had ever been squeezed, and she sighed, “Ah, there you are, Lucy.”

Lucy nuzzled the side of Alura’s neck.  “I’m sorry,” she sighed, exhausted.

She felt Alura’s hand, gently tracing up and down her spine.  “Do not be sorry.”

“But I… I pointed a….”

“Yes, I know.”  Lucy felt Alura’s other hand grip her waist.  “And as I told you, you cannot hurt me.”

Lucy’s face flushed with shame.  She’d had a few nightmares but she’d never had such a vivid flashback with Alura before.  She’d never threatened a lover before.  A part of her feared that Alura would run after this.

“I’m just damaged goods, I guess,” she said sadly.

“I’m not familiar with this term,” Alura answered after a moment.  “I don’t care for the sound of it, though.  You have wounds, as I have.”  Her tone was matter of fact, clearly not meant to shame, but to point out in clear, simple terms the bare facts of their situation. “Our broken places are what join us together.”

Lucy made paths down Alura’s body with her hands.  She propped herself up on her elbows again and looked down at her.  “But I don’t want to … I don’t want you to feel like I’m just using you as a bandage, you know?  As an anti-depressant?”

Alura shook her head and kissed Lucy once on the chin.  “I have never seen you quite so lost,” she sighed.  “I was glad to be the reason that you found your way back.  I lost my world.  I wouldn’t want to lose you as well.”

And so it was, Lucy thought.  Alura was what brought her back.  Their broken edges fit together in precisely the right ways.  

There was no world for Lucy but this one, its rotations around the yellow sun made perfect by the presence of the woman holding her.


	3. Chapter 3

Lucy was hanging on to Alura’s hand as they strolled together up the street.  Sundown on Saturday in this part of the city meant that the drink houses were all open and young people spilled out onto the sidewalks, dressed shabbily, but in a way that seemed very intentional.  Lucy had tried to explain “hipster” to her, but Alura couldn’t really get her head around it.  She counted no less than a dozen piercings on one young man’s face as he leaned in the doorway of a drink house whose front windows were strung with tiny lights.  

“And my daughter likes this neighborhood,” she repeated, still not quite believing it.  Kara had been raised as nobility.  This seemed incompatible with that.

“Yes.  She lives down that block there,” Lucy said, pointing to a cross-street.  “It used to be Alex’s place.”

Alura had met Alex a number of times at the DEO.  She was introduced as Kara’s adoptive sister, a member of the human family who had taken care of her since she’d arrived here.  

“Alex and Astra live in the building over there.”  Lucy pointed to their destination, a large red brick building that was, Lucy had explained, a former factory that had now been converted into attractive living spaces.  

“With the other… Maggie?”  Alura asked.

Lucy nodded.

“Is that… usual?”

Lucy smiled that indulgent smile that she got when she found Alura’s relentless curiosity adorable.  “It’s not, no.”  She slipped her arm around Alura’s waist.  “It’s pretty unusual, to be honest.  But the three of them, they have something special.  Alex tried to explain that, at least from your sister’s perspective, it’s some sort of… religious thing?  The shared warrior spirit or something…?”  Lucy broke off, frowning, as she tried to remember what she’d been told.

Alura was fairly sure she knew what Lucy was talking about.  “Yes, I think I know what you mean.  I had suspected my sister was possessed of that type of spirit.”  She shook her head, smiling wryly.  “But of course Rao would gift her with two mates, instead of only one.”

She felt Lucy’s hand slide down the small of her back and pinch her on the behind.  “What’s the matter, I don’t keep you busy enough?” she purred with a measure of mischief.

Alura laughed.  “Quite the contrary,” she promised.  “I just meant that….”  Her voice dropped and she became far more serious than she’d been a moment ago.  “... she lost so much more than I did.  She deserves such abundance.”

Lucy nodded with understanding.

“Lucy, I’m unsure of this course of action.  Am I ready for this conversation?”

Lucy gazed at her, eyes soft in the warm dusk light.  This shade of red in the sunset reminded Alura a little of home, the home that was gone from space.  Lucy’s face was bathed in it.  Alura wondered what it would have been like to share Krypton with her.  “Only you know that.  But I think that you have few connections to your family and culture, and she’s more than that to you.  She’s your twin.  You’ve told me what that’s like.  It’s hard to face our regrets, but in this case, it seems worth it.”

Alura’s heart ached, all at once.  It descended on her like an avalanche.  She’d seen Astra a few times since she’d been back, but the circumstances had been very limiting, and they hadn’t discussed the real invisible weight that lay between them.  Alura was only half-ready.

  
  


*****************

  
  


Even in these strangest of circumstances, staring into Astra’s face was like coming home.  Even the way in which her eyes bore both traces of a haunted look at moments, yet also something that seemed like peace.  They had both found lives here, lovers, gifts from Rao who were capable of understanding their broken souls and loving them as they were.

They sat together on the deck, the neighborhood’s weekend revelries drifting up from below.  Lucy and Maggie sat inside, chatting and drinking their black coffees.  Alura didn’t like coffee; it was too much like Kryptonian  _ k’onn-makah _ , which she’d never cared for either.  Her sister, she learned, actually had developed the taste for it.

“You could get that in prison,” she explained, her voice careful and restrained.  “I didn’t much care for it either but it was a taste of home so I drank it nonetheless.”

Alura broke almost instantly.  “I want to know everything,” she whispered, and her voice shook.  “I want to know everything that happened to you.”

Astra shook her head.  “I do not want to relive those things,” she said vehemently.  

Alura’s eyes welled up, as she gazed her sister’s face, her twin, the other half of herself that she thought she had lost forever.  “I had so few choices.  I didn’t want to send you there but I knew at least that you would survive.”

“By force of will,” Astra acknowledged, “yes.”

Alura shook her head.  “That is … not what I mean.”  She reached for Astra’s hand.  Relief flooded her heart when Astra did not push her away.  “I mean… I knew that the Council was not about to heed your warning.  I knew Krypton was as good as dead.  I knew the only hope for you to survive was getting you off the planet, and the only way to get you off the planet was to send you … there.”

Recognition dawned on Astra’s face as she understood; Alura had sent her to Fort Rozz because it was the only option she had that allowed her to save her sister’s life.  

They cried together for some time after this.  Alura was struck by how their twin selves had mirrored each other without knowing it, in so many quiet ways; both should have died, and yet both survived the destruction of Krypton.  Both hurtled through space and found their way to Earth.  Both lost husbands.  Both were building new lives here with new lovers –in both their cases, women– who were temperamentally and experientially well-suited to the needs of their battered souls.  

It was a curious thing, the way that they were bound, even when they seemed to be on opposite sides of a war.  Their fates kept them alive for each other.  Astra’s actions which had seemed so violent and so rash, should have torn them apart and yet, they were taken out of love, no less than Alura’s.  These were truths they never thought they would have the chance to tell each other.

Alura had heard Lucy refer to Astra as “stoic” on occasion, but that was not who she remembered, and it was not who was beside her now, clutching her shoulders and weeping along with her.  

“Rao has decided we are only half ourselves without each other,” Astra sniffled, finally disengaging.

Alura nodded.  It was true.  Perhaps the elders considered their birth an anomaly, a mistake, but to Alura, it felt like perfection.  For however much she was growing to love Lucy Lane, she needed this other piece of home, this other part of herself, to feel whole.  

“He has given you much to be thankful for,” she observed, gesturing inside to where Lucy was chatting with Maggie and Alex, who was just arriving from somewhere.  They were laughing warmly together about something, Alex mugging wildly as she related some story that Lucy and Maggie both seemed to appreciate.

Astra nodded.  “I feel his presence when I am with them.”  She tilted her head and looked at Alura.  “Is it so for you as well, with your Lucy Lane?”

Alura thought.  “It is precious,” she answered with a slight hesitation.  She recalled in that instant the gentle patience with which Lucy was guiding her through life on earth, the times in which they had held each other steady through the ghosts of their sadness and fears.  She thought of how Lucy looked when the sun was going down and its light was red enough to remind Alura of pale sunrises on Krypton.

“You fear to say it,” Astra observed, matter-of-fact and without judgment.  “Because she is human.  Because it did not come with the markers of the divine, as my love for Alex and Maggie did.”  Astra always knew her mind like nobody else did.

Alura nodded. “I suppose that’s so.”

“Do not fear it.  If you are blessed, then Rao has blessed you, and you have no reason or right to reject it.”  It was Lucy, she reminded herself, who encouraged her to come here.

Alura smiled faintly.  “Your faith seems to have only grown in the intervening years.”

Astra smiled back.  “And why should it not?  I have found a home, and love, and warrior spirits to share it with.  The other half of my soul, my sister, has been returned to me.  After years upon years of suffering, I am rewarded.  Loved.”  She looked down at their hands, restlessly gripping and releasing each other between them on the table.  “And my faith, apart from you and Kara, is the strongest, most tangible remainder of the world we once loved.”  

Alura, finally made anxious by the push and pull of their hands, gripped Astra’s and stared into the mirror of her face.  

“Pray with me,”  Astra suggested softly.

Alura nodded slowly after a moment.  She had not done so, not really, since she’d arrived.  What was the point, she had wondered, of praying to a god who was so far from her, who had cared so little for her that he had allowed her world to collapse into flames?  But she understood now that she had seen it all wrong.  That it was her people who had allowed the world to collapse in flames.  That he had, in his infinite love for her, and her sister, allowed them to survive, to begin again.

They clasped each other’s forearms, and bowed their heads.  Astra began the words aloud, as Alura had not heard them spoken in so very long, and they prayed.  

Rao’s presence, it seemed, was not so far after all.  


End file.
